Scottish police bail out on StarOffice, embrace Microsoft

The Central Scotland Police have turned away from StarOffice after five years …

Scotland Yard might be famous for detective work, but police in Scotland couldn't find a way to make StarOffice meet their needs. The Central Scotland Police gave StarOffice a try, but they're giving up in frustration and going back to Microsoft Office. They cited cost of maintenance and interoperability with other agencies as barriers to StarOffice's success.

"It's not really based on any ideological argument about open-source software, it's based on pure business needs," David Stirling, head of IT for Central Scotland Police, told InfoWorld.

The Central Scotland Police switched to StarOffice in 2000, running the open source suite on top of Windows on 400 desktops. They also had 30 Linux servers for data storage, so this was no small implementation.

The agency said in 2000 that it would see initial savings of at least ?245,000 (US$439,000) from switching to StarOffice and Linux, and that the open-source deployment would allow it to bring productivity software to more of its officers.

Early this year, however, the agency reviewed its IT infrastructure as part of an effort to meet performance targets, comply with Scotland's Freedom of Information Act and work more closely with other law enforcement groups. Following the review, and a follow-up study in March, it decided to switch back to Microsoft.

Is this a damning indictment of StarOffice? The problem of interoperability with Microsoft Office, which was used by a majority of other agencies, proved central. When the police had moved to StarOffice, it was the year 2000, long before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Since those attacks, however, government agencies have been scrambling to address inter-agency communications problems.

StarOffice defenders are going to point to the dominance of Microsoft Office as the real problem, but there are two problems with blaming Office's ubiquity for this. First, in any business environment, supporting two tools to do one function is always going to cause efficiency problems, and with increased inter-agency work, that's effectively the situation they're in, be it Office, Word Perfect, or something else. Secondly, the reality of the situation is that, yes, StarOffice's success will partially be determined by how much of a "drop-in replacement" it is for Microsoft Office. Sometimes the truth hurts, and all of the claims that "all they need is a great WYSIWYG editor" doesn't change that.

The police also found it difficult to file reports remotely, and were irritated to have to return to their desks in order do their reports. Now they'll be using SharePoint for remote access and for handling inter-agency requests required by Scotland's FOIA.

Disclaimer: Scotland Yard is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service, based in London.

Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher